23: Broken pieces of pottery

Chapter 2 moves into Job's second test. God asks Satan if Job has cursed His name, and Satan replies no. However, Satan says, if God were to inflict physical damage on Job, he would surely curse his name. So Satan covers Job's body with boils. His wife tells him to give up his God walk, but Job, being righteous, says that we must accept the good with the bad.

Again, I see myself in Satan's situation. If I were to take away things from someone else and they remained faithful to God, I would probably come up with an excuse too. There are times when I feel like some pastors have it all. Now I know that being a pastor is tough. As a spiritual leader, they must feel the pressure from God and their peers. However, they must know in the back of their minds that God will take care of them. They are usually married and have 2+ children. That's not a bad lifestyle. And for some reason, most of them get married at such a young age that they don't know what it's like to have to date after college. In this sense, they are the exception, not the norm. If most people get married at 27 or 28, how can they understand the difficulty of meeting people?

What I find interesting in this section is that when Job is giving the bad case of the boils, he scrapes them off with a broken piece of pottery. Wow, anyone else sense the blatant metaphor? A broken piece of pottery scraping the 'broken piece of pottery' - Job. It is perfect. The symbolism is great.

Lastly, what is up with the wife? They are obviously not equally yoked. Maybe they were at some time, but the wife is clearly not as close to God as Job. She is telling him to curse God and he is not. The word 'integrity' that the wife refers to makes me think of pride. I believe she is asking him to let go of his pride and to curse God.

It's hard to imagine Christianity with pride, but I believe that Christians can bring pride into the church. As one of the seven deadly sins, Pride is a God killer. It makes us holier than thou. But it is interesting that the wife refers to this. For me, I like to think that pride only exists outside of the church. You know, only in the real world. But the truth is that pride goes with us everywhere, just as lust and greed latch onto our backs.

Still, I give Job a lot of credit. He could have listened to his wife and cursed God. That would have been easy. She made it seem okay. I guess she was just supporting her man. But he resisted. However, there are worst things than boils and I think Job realized that. He knew that things were going to get worse, yet he still trusted God.

I still don't believe that the story of Job happened. Nothing concrete has come through the text. I want to make it clear that I believe everything else in the Bible. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, etc. But the story of Job seems to much like a Greek play and it just doesn't make any sense. That's fine. God will have to work on my heart and my mind as I go through this book. I am open to anything He says.